I wove the plot together in the last few days and it works well, but it’s not a 10/10.

Yet.

There are kinks at the 3/4 mark where I know I’m forcing the plot instead of letting it play out. It’s too quick. It needs more space.

Consequently, I’ve let the plot outline sit for a few days. I come back to it from time to time to reread and work out the snags and the knots. Here’s one such rewrite from today:

Em’s life crashes down. She finds out she is pregnant, her ex boyfriend won’t pay money he owes her. She can’t afford her rent and is too ashamed to return to her friends. She lives out of her car for over a week, scuttles out of the inner city to an unknown suburb and finds work in a corner shop, making milkshakes. She works long hours. She washes in the sink at work when nobody’s looking. It’s everything she didn’t want for her life, and it parallels her mother’s journey.

When she has earned the rent, she comes back to the share house, but discovers she has lost her room to a new housemate. The whole dynamic has shifted. The warmth is gone.

Em ends up in the “crack room”, a tiny, horrible room up in the attic, where the bed is pushed under the sloping ceiling and people have written graffiti all over it. It records late night ravings, hopes and dreams. She sees her own name, written in a heart. It’s her mum’s handwriting. Her mum was up here for months, lying awake in the bed, thinking about her!

I like this a lot more than what I had. It breathes. While the story is on Em, we can imagine the others in the story licking their own wounds.